Speakers

ORGCon brings together the best writers, academics, technologists and lawyers. Here are the confirmed speakers so far. We will be updating regularly so please follow us on Twitter or Facebook for further updates.

Jamie Bartlett is the Director of the Centre for the Analysis of Social Media at the think-tank Demos, where he specialises in online social movements and the impact of technology on society. He is also author of Radicals (2017) about political outsiders and The Dark Net (2014). He is a regular commentator on national and international media outlets and recently presented the two-part BBC documentary series 'The Secrets of Silicon Valley'.

Pandora Blake is a queer pornographer, performer and activist. Her films have won multiple international awards and her website Dreams of Spanking has won legal battles against UK internet censorship. She is an active campaigner for sex work decriminalisation and labour rights, obscenity law reform, civil liberties and human rights, with a focus on freedom of expression, gender, sexuality and privacy. She is the recipient of a Sexual Freedom Award and is the official spokesperson for Backlash, defending freedom of sexual expression among consenting adults in the UK. She crowd-funds her work via Patreon.

Caroline Criado-Perez is a writer, broadcaster and award-winning feminist campaigner. She is published across the major national media and regularly appears in both print and broadcast as a commentator. Her first book, Do it Like a Woman, was published by Portobello in 2015 and was chosen by Bridget Christie as one of her books of the year in the Guardian. She is currently working on her second book, which will be about the gender data gap. Caroline has a degree in English language and literature from the University of Oxford, and studied behavioural and feminist economics at the LSE. She was the 2013 recipient of the Liberty Human Rights Campaigner of the Year award, and was named OBE in the Queen’s Birthday Honours 2015. She is currently campaigns director at 89up. Image credit: Tracy King

Nighat Dad is the Executive Director of Digital Rights Foundation. She is an accomplished lawyer and a human rights activist. Nighat is one of the pioneers who have been campaigning around access to open internet in Pakistan and globally. She is a TED Global Fellow for 2017, has been listed as TIME's Next Generation Leader, and is the recipient of Atlantic Council Freedom Award, and Human Rights Tulip Award.

Azmina Dhrodia is a Researcher in the Technology and Human Rights Team at the Amnesty International Secretariat. She is currently investigating the human rights implications of online violence and abuse against women on social media platforms through research and policy analysis of existing international human rights standards, national legislation, company community standards and reporting mechanisms.

She was previously the Campaigns, Projects and Networks Coordinator in the Gender, Sexuality and Identity Programme from 2011-2016 where she coordinated global campaigns on gender, LGBTI rights and Indigenous Peoples rights. She has participated in research missions to Lebanon and contributed to a report on the risks of violence, harassment and exploitation facing refugee women from Syria in Lebanon. She has also investigated gender related human rights violations in Nepal, Uganda and the UAE. Azmina holds a MSc in Human Rights from the London School of Economics and a Bachelor of Arts in Political Science from the University of British Columbia.

Helen Lewis is deputy editor of the New Statesman, and has written for the New York Times, Sunday Times and the Guardian, among others. She is a regular host of the BBC’s Week in Westminster, and a regular panellist on the Sunday Politics. She tweets: @helenlewis

Sarah Jamie Lewis is an anonymity & privacy researcher, working on projects that help people take control of their own security. She is also the editor of Queer Privacy, “a collection of essays about community, family, coming out, dating, domestic violence, activism, sex work and suicide”. She writes for mascherari.press and tweets @SarahJamieLewis.

Graham Linehan is a television writer, actor and director who, often in partnership with Arthur Mathews, has written or co-written a number of popular television comedies. He is most noted for his involvement in Father Ted, Black Books and The IT Crowd (in which the ORG logo has featured on set). He also co-wrote the first series of Big Train and created the 2009 #welovetheNHS Twitter hashtag campaign in response to US Republican attacks on the NHS.

Nanjira Sambuli leads the Web Foundation’s advocacy efforts to promote digital equality in access to and use of the Web. A Nairobi-based researcher and analyst, Nanjira brings broad expertise as an advocate and consultant working at the intersection of governance, media, culture and society.

Prior to joining the Web Foundation, Nanjira was Research Lead at the iHub in Nairobi, where she helped shape governance and tech research, and provided strategic guidance for the growth of technology research in East Africa. Her research includes work on the ICT and Governance Landscape in East Africa (iHub Research), Cybersecurity and Cyber-resilience in East Africa (CIGI), research into the challenges of promoting Internet access in developing countries while upholding net neutrality principles (Journal of Cyber Policy), and Technology Innovation Hubs and Policy Engagement (Making All Voices Count). Nanjira is also a columnist for the Daily Nation newspaper in Kenya, a member of DFID’s Digital Advisory Panel and served as a deputy on the United Nations High Level Panel for Women’s Economic Empowerment (2016-17).

Noel Sharkey PhD, DSc FIET, FBCS CITP FRIN FRSA is Professor of AI and Robotics and Co-director of the Foundation for Responsible Robotics and Chair of the International Committee for Robot Arms Control. He has moved freely across academic disciplines, lecturing in departments of engineering, philosophy, psychology, cognitive science, linguistics, artificial intelligence and computer science, in both the UK (Essex, Exeter and Sheffield) and US (Yale and Stanford). His current research passion is on the ethics of robot applications.

Audrey Tang, a civic hacker and Taiwan’s Digital Minister in charge of Social Enterprise, is known for revitalizing global open source communities such as Perl and Haskell. Audrey served on Taiwan national development council’s open data committee and K-12 curriculum committee; and led the country’s first e-Rulemaking project. She was a consultant with Apple on computational linguistics, with Oxford University Press on crowd lexicography, and with Socialtext on social interaction design. She actively contributes to Taiwan’s g0v (“gov-zero”), a vibrant community focusing on creating tools for civil society, with the call to “fork the government”. Credit: Medialab Prado (CC BY-SA 2.0)

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